[99signals Podcast Ep. #5] A Simple SEO Hack to Get High Quality Backlinks

Link building is one of the most effective techniques to boost your search rankings, but it can also be the most challenging aspect of SEO. Since the Google Penguin algorithm update, links need to acquired and earned through content marketing and email outreach strategies.

In episode #5 of the Marketing Mantra podcast, I’ll share a simple SEO hack with you to build high-quality backlinks. Using this technique, you can have an edge over your organic competitors when it comes to building backlinks that are authoritative and scalable.

[Note: Links to tools, resources, and articles discussed in this episode are included in the podcast transcript.]

Listen to episode #5 of the Marketing Mantra podcast here or scroll down to read the full podcast transcript:

A Simple SEO Hack to Get High Quality Backlinks [Full Podcast Transcript]

Welcome to another episode of Marketing Mantra. I’m Sandeep Mallya and today, I’m going to talk about a simple SEO hack you can use to build high-quality backlinks.

Here’s the thing: Link building can be very challenging. Especially if you’ve a new website with no domain authority.

Let’s say you’ve done most things right with your content: like your keyword research has been spot-on, and you’ve created a unique piece of content in your niche, it’s still going to be tough for you to reach page 1 on Google without at least building a few backlinks along the way.

If you have zero backlinks, it’s going to be practically impossible for you to outrank your competitors who may be already ranking for all the profitable keywords in your niche.

Yes, links can come naturally as well when you have great content, but it usually takes a long time.

Which is why I’m going to reveal this simple SEO hack with you which will enable you to build backlinks quickly and compete for that #1 spot in search engine results.

This SEO hack is building backlinks through infographics.

I know what you’re thinking. Infographics may get you lots of shares on social media, but how can they help you build backlinks?

It’s true you can get lots of engagement for your infographic on social media, especially on platforms like Pinterest and Tumblr. You may even drive a lot of referral traffic back to your website through these sites.

Before I reveal how we can generate backlinks through infographics, let’s get the basics of an infographic right.

As is the case with any piece of content you create, the first aspect of designing an infographic involves keyword research.

So before you choose a topic for your infographic, it’s important to do some keyword research and find out what topics are trending in your niche.

For instance, if you’re running a meditation blog, then you can start this whole process by doing a Google Image Search on “meditation infographics” to see what kind of infographics already exist.

Or you could use a tool like Buzzsumo to discover some of the infographics that have gone viral on social media.

Just type in the keywords ‘meditation infographic’ in the Buzzsumo search bar and check out which infographics have received the maximum shares on social media. Pay special attention to ‘Pinterest shares’ because this is where the infographics are the most popular.

And finally, you can use Pinterest itself to find interesting and trending infographics.

You can open a new spreadsheet or a Google Sheet and note down each topic that you find interesting. List down at least 5-7 topics that you think you can design an infographic on. And for your first infographic, just zero-in on a topic that you find most interesting.

Once you zero-in on this topic, it’s time to start creating your own version of it.

But you’ve to remember one thing – there’s no point wasting your time creating an infographic that is not as good as the original one. Your aim here is to create an infographic that is far better in every way possible – it needs to have better design, it needs to have better content, and it needs to have more interesting information.

With that in mind, let’s move on to the second aspect which is designing a good infographic.

If you want your infographic to go viral and get tons of authoritative backlinks, you’ve to spend some amount of time designing an infographic that is share-worthy!

While there are several resources you can use to design your infographic, I recommend these 3 resources:

The first resource is Canva. Canva is an online design tool which has a lot free infographic templates to choose from and almost each one of them is professionally designed. You can use any of the templates on Canva and tweak the content and make it your own unique infographic.

The second tool I’d recommend, and this is one of my favorites, is Venngage. Venngage is an online infographic maker which has more than 500 professionally designed infographic templates to choose. It’s not free like Canva… I mean, Canva has a paid plan but most of its features are free to access. Venngage has a few free infographic templates, but to access premium templates, you need to upgrade to any of the paid plans.

On similar lines, you have Piktochart as well. Piktochart helps you create high-quality infographics with their easy-to-use infographic maker. You need not have any design skills whatsoever. But once again, the free plan has very few templates and if you have to use any of their premium templates, you need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.

So these are three resources I’d recommend – Canva, Venngage, and Piktochart – if you want to create your own infographic.

But let’s say you don’t have the time or bandwidth to create your own infographic, then you can hire a designer on Fiverr.

Fiverr has lots of freelance designers and you may have to pay more than $5 to get a good designer. Or if you have a slightly higher budget, you can hire a freelancer designer from Upwork or Freelancer.com.

So these are the three sites you can go to if you have some budget in mind for your infographic.

With Fiverr, you have to pay considerably less than what you’d pay on Upwork or Freelancer.com.

These are the options available to you. But I’d recommend if you have the time, just use Canva or Venngage to get started, at least when it comes to creating your first infographic. Because they have infographic templates that are well-designed. You just need to tweak the content and make it your own, and you’ll have a very unique infographic template on your hand.

So that’s the second aspect i.e., creating an infographic through any of the online tools.

The next aspect is, of course, promoting the infographic and generating high-quality backlinks.

Once the infographic is created, you need to create some content around it as well. That’s a given because stand-alone infographics rarely perform well in search engines.

So you need to spend some time creating good, engaging content for your infographic. This will increase the chances of your article being noticed by search engines and it’ll also help you rank higher in SERPs.

You can either have the infographic at the start of the article or at the end. There are some publishers who usually have the infographic at the start of the article itself. Some people prefer to have it at the end of the article. You can choose any of these methods.

Once your infographic is published, it’s time to get it out there and spend some time promoting it. These are the steps you can follow:

Sumo has a set of tools and many of these tools are free. I wouldn’t call them free, but they are certainly freemium. And Sumo’s Image Sharer plugin is one such tool which is free of cost. Basically, the point of having Sumo’s Image Sharer installed is it makes it easier for people to share your infographic on social media.

This is a free WordPress plugin and when someone moves their curser over the infographic, they’ll be shown social media sharing buttons, and it’ll make it super easy for them to share your infographic with their network.

Step 2: Generate an embed code for your infographic

This is where link building comes into the picture. You can generate an embed code for your infographic and make it easier for others to share and embed your infographic onto their own sites. For this you can use a free tool called Siege Media’s Embed Code Generator. You can just give a Google search or I’ll provide links to all the tools discussed in this podcast episode.

This is a free tool and it hardly takes two minutes to generate your unique embed code. Every time someone includes your infographic in their content, you get an attribution. And just like that, you get a backlink.

Step 3: Submit your infographic to infographic submission sites

There are tons of infographic submission sites out there where you can submit your infographic for free or for a nominal fee. And some of the most popular ones have a very high domain authority score and all the links that you get from these sites will be do-follow links which means they carry a lot of link juice.

Just by having your infographic submitted on these sites, you increase your chances of getting noticed by search engines.

I’ve made a list of 40 infographic submission sites at 99signals. I’ll provide a link to it in the description.

You can check these sites out. Like I said, some of them do accept free submissions, and if your infographic is really well-designed, informative, and something that they’d be proud to include in their infographic directory, your submission may be accepted for free.

But in most cases, you may have to pay a nominal fee which can range from something as low as $3 on some sites and as high as $25 on other sites.

I’ve provided all these details in the list of 40 infographic submission sites I’ve made. Based on your current needs, your budget, and the domain authority score of these sites, you can prioritize your efforts accordingly.

When you submit your infographic to these sites, make sure that your infographic itself has a unique description. Don’t copy the same description on 5-6 different sites. Just make sure that each description is unique.

By having your infographic published on these sites, you can boost your SEO in a very short time. This is a very proactive approach to link building. You’re not spending time on outreach campaigns which may nor may not fetch you a backlink, and you’re not waiting for links to come naturally to you. You’re taking a proactive step by submitting your infographic to these sites and you’ll get a high-quality, contextual backlink in return.

Once again, the link to the 40 infographic submission sites will be included in the description. Do check it out. Pick at least 3-5 sites from this list where you can submit your infographic.

Step 4: Promote Your Infographic on Reddit

Infographics are quite popular on Reddit and there is even a subreddit dedicated to infographics with has close to 85,000 members. You can share your infographic here and if it gets a lot of upvotes, you’ll get a dofollow backlink in return.

But even if you don’t get a backlink in return, just by sharing your infographic here, you can increase your social shares and traffic that you get from Reddit.

Aside from this infographic subreddit, there are smaller infographic-dedicated subreddits as well. Create a Reddit account if you don’t already have one. Just make sure you read the submission guidelines of each subreddit before you share your infographic with them.

You can use a tool like Buzzsumo or Ninja Outreach to find influencers in your niche. Once you’ve identified a list of people you can reach out to, you can send them an outreach email, basically informing them that you’ve designed an interesting infographic on your topic and when people reply to your email showing interest, you share the infographic with them and offer to write a short 150-300 word introduction if they’re willing to share the infographic on their site.

That’s why it’s called the guestographic link building method because it’s short guest post you’re offering with a unique infographic. And by doing this, you can get an authorative, contextual backlink in return.

This infographic link building method is not as easy as some of the other ones that were discussed before this, like submitting the infographic to infographic submission sites or generating an embed code for your infographic. But it can really get you contextual backlinks.

This requires a bit of time and effort. If you don’t have the time or bandwidth to indulge in the guestographic link building method, you can focus on the other techniques that we discussed in this episode, mainly submitting the infographic to infographic submission sites.

That does it for this episode of Marketing Mantra. I really hope you enjoyed this episode and learned something new. If you’re listening to this podcast on Anchor, feel free to leave a voice message or you can provide your feedback at podcast@99signals.com. I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions, and I’ll address them in the next episode. Thanks once again for tuning in. This is Sandeep Mallya signing off, and I’ll see you guys soon.

About the Marketing Mantra Podcast

Marketing Mantra is a weekly podcast by 99signals.com, hosted by Sandeep Mallya. If you’re an entrepreneur, blogger, small business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in marketing, you’re sure to find something useful and interesting in each episode.

Join us every week for a new episode and get better at marketing, SEO, and blogging.

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About Me

Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!

I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 where I help SMBs leverage social media, SEO, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.

I started 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other solopreneurs with all the right information they needed to launch a successful business.

ABOUT ME

Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!

I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 where I help SMBs leverage social media, SEO, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.

I started 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other solopreneurs with all the right information they needed to launch a successful business.

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99signals is a marketing blog run by me, Sandeep Mallya, to help bloggers and entrepreneurs run a successful side business and earn extra income through blogging and affiliate marketing.